Facebook Wants To Poach A Whole Bunch Of Talent From YouTube — And The Ad Money That Comes With Them

Facebook has quietly formed a team in Los Angeles to poach talent
from YouTube, which has cornered the market on people who want to
make a living through online video,
according to the Wall Street Journal.

Previously, video developers would promote
themselves via social media sites like Facebook and then link to
their content on YouTube, which splits advertising revenue with
anyone who uploads a video.

Facebook had been working on
the video project for at least sixth months, prompting
speculation that Facebook will be launching an ad
product by the end of the year, the
Wall Street Journal says.

Earlier this
week, The Guardian
reported that Facebook had been courting
some of YouTube's top multi-channel networks (MCNs). MCNs help
video performers and creators with business-side functions like
cross promotion, sales, funding and audience development in
exchange for advertising revenue.

In addition,
Facebook recently told Variety that it would soon be adding
two new features to its videos: a view counter and a
"related videos" feature — both of which are characteristic of
YouTube.

But if Facebook is to be successful at becoming a go-to place to
stream videos online, it must be able to seduce MCNs and their
most popular performers to get them to choose Facebook over other
video providers such as Vine, Yahoo and YouTube.

Content
providers have already been using Facebook to promote their
videos on YouTube, but there's often no money in it. There is no
way for someone to let an ad run on a video they've placed on
Facebook, and take a cut of the revenue that
generates.

Facebook is
currently discussing with video content creators how advertising
may be included in their videos, the WSJ says. GoPro is one
company having meetings with Facebook about video
ideas.

Facebook's
main advantage is its newsfeed. It offers a strong platform for
content providers to build up loyal fan communities. Fans can see
performer's videos in their newsfeeds without having to actively
search for them. Plus, people are more
likely to spend time scrolling through their newsfeed than
YouTube's homepage.

But a
potential pitfall is Facebook's "graph search" function. It's
easy to find videos on YouTube because Google has an amazing
search engine behind it. Search on Facebook is ... in
development.

The Journal reported that Walt Disney’s
Maker Studios and Collective Digital Studio have been testing
videos Facebook. Anonymous sources told the Journal that
the "traffic was very, very promising."